The first trailer for Robert Eggers' Werwulf is expected to release on June 29 to coincide with the next full moon, and following a moody (but rather nondescript) shot of a mist-covered forest, we finally have an official look at the movie.
Esquire has shared a promo still featuring star Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the unnamed protagonist who will become the titular werewolf.
"He's a farmer," Eggers says of the character. "He's a man who is cursed. It's a story about a man who is cursed and is trying to find salvation through love. He's a character who is haunted and in great pain. Nobody has a name in the movie. Aside from a dog. [Laughs.]"
Eggers was careful not to give away too much about the story, but he did reveal that Werwulf won't include the usual tropes associated with the "wolf man" myth.
"Backpedaling away from influences and mythologies that do and don't have to do with the film, the cool thing about going back into the past is that you can kind of hit a reset button. So, all the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and silver bullets and a lot of the stuff that has become almost campy doesn't exist in the mythology of this movie. So you don't need to have seen Lon Cheney Jr.'s The Wolf Man or An American Werewolf in London to get what's going on here."
The filmmaker also revealed that Willem Dafoe will play a hunter, and that Lily-Rose Depp is the "heart of the movie."
"Lily is truly transformative. There's a very clear physical change in her body and her makeup, but she inhabits a very different person that's very different from her and very different from any character she's ever played. She's Aaron's wife, and she's a mother of several children and also a farmer. She’s sort of the most gracious person in the film."
This is a genre Eggers clearly feels passionate about, as The Northman is the only one of his four previous films that doesn't contain any horror elements (and that's probably debatable).
Eggers said that this movie is the "darkest thing" he's ever written during a recent Film At Lincoln Center Q&A session.
"But yeah, it's a medieval werewolf movie. And it's... it's also the darkest thing I have ever written. By far."
Werwulf is set for release on Christmas Day, 2026. Do you plan on checking this out on the big screen?